THE HEAD OF the Health Service Executive has said that Ireland’s Covid-19 testing backlog has been eliminated.

At the HSE’s weekly operational update in UCD this morning, Paul Reid said that 4,000 tests have been completed this weekend between staff and residents in long-term care settings, which are a priority for testing.

While testing facilities are operating smoothly, Reid said that acquiring personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers remains “challenging” due to the extraordinary global demand.

A commercial agreement with a German lab, which has been instrumental in clearing the testing backlog, is being finalised and 26 labs in Ireland are now working on Covid-19 testing.

The labs are carrying out approximately 1,000 tests per day, 60% of them are being processed in the 26 Irish labs are the remaining tests are being sent to Germany.

“We have eliminated any backlog for lab testing and we have significantly built up our capacity,” Reid said.

“We are now in a position where we are meeting the existing demands set out under the current definitions,” he added.

We have zero backlog.

Over 11,000 swab samples were collected from people with symptoms of the virus in testing centres around Ireland in the last week. There is capacity for 7,000 per day in the 48 testing centres around the country.

Chief Clinical Officer Dr Colm Henry explained that three groups are now being prioritised for testing. These are:

• Healthcare workers and residents in any setting where there has been a suspected or known outbreak of Covid-19
• All healthcare workers and residents in any facility with a new case of the virus
• Healthcare workers in the nursing home sector

Personal protective equipment

Reid said that the availability of PPE has been a primary challenge throughout the pandemic, describing the behaviour of some other countries as “modern-day piracy”.

“When I mention the word ‘piracy’, what I actually mean is, whether it’s for PPE, ventilators, reagents, as soon as you think you have a stock secured, somebody somewhere in the world is outbidding you. Whether it’s at the delivery stage or it’s nearly at the export stage,” he said.

So there’s a lot of piracy, modern-day piracy, going on.

Despite these pressures Ireland has not lost any orders it had executed, such as happened with masks bound for Germany that were diverted to the United States. Reid thanked the ambassador to China, the IDA and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for helping secure the supply lines.

Regarding the quality of the PPE arriving from China, Reid explained that regions in China have put stronger controls on ensuring that it is up to standard. Issues with the quality of the materials delivered have been resolved and a second, larger, batch of orders has commenced.

In order to speed up the delivery of the essential equipment the HSE asked Chinese suppliers to consolidate deliveries into one large order, worth €130 million.

That delivery will include 7.5 million gloves, 2.5 million face shields, 6 million respirator masks, 10 million surgical masks, and 3 million gloves.

A total of 11 million protective gowns will also be delivered over the course of the coming weeks on several flights.

A large delivery of 750,000 pieces of PPE was made yesterday and 378 deliveries were made to nursing homes. 

“We continue to urge all healthcare workers to be extremely prudent in the use of PPE and to ensure that is used for the correct purposes,” Reid said.

With reporting from Cónal Thomas at UCD